Currently eComStation dependes on the good will of IBM / Serenity Systems / Mensys. If we push eComStation to became open source we can remove any kind of vendor dependency. If eCS became open source there can be more players willing to use it and improve it. Currently the source code is closed and can not be shared with other developers to be improved or fixed. eComStation has the risk as OS/2 to became abandonware at any time, without any future expectation.

If we want to have a bigger user community we had to show that this platform has a future. A stopper to use eCS is the uncertain future because IBM stopped developing OS/2, and Serenity / Mensys are not recognized software developers.

A way to show that the platform has a future is to clone it with open source replacements (using the open source definition of opensource.org). Replace eComStation file by file with open source replacements will be a good start for this. For example the Haiku OS Project (BeOS Open Source Clone) has more expectative than eComStation, and Haiku had been selected to be on the Google Summer of Code 2008.

We need to remove the vendor dependencies to ensure the future of the OS. That will benefit all of us, even Serenity and Mensys.